By: Bitethehand

Bitethehand
Mon, 28 Jul 2025 11:47:37 +0000

For an interesting but related foray into this subject, William Boyd’s ‘Restless’ provides an interesting insight into the UK government’s attempt to counter the Nazi and Fascists sympathisers in the United States.

Restless pulls you deep into the obscure, forgotten intricacies of wartime espionage, in particular the covert operations run by the British in America before Pearl Harbor. Eva works for a unit attached to British Security Co-ordination, which ran one of the biggest-ever British covert operations from room 3603 in the Rockefeller Centre.

A secret agency of news manipulation, it planted pro-British and anti-German stories in the US media, perhaps the first example of large-scale spin. The aim was to persuade Americans that joining the war in Europe was a good and vital thing, and it is against this fraudulent backdrop that Eva carries out her drops, hides in her safe houses and throws ‘crows’ (Nazi spies) off her tail.

By the greatest of ironies, just as the covert operations were at serious risk of being exposed and destroyed, Eva uses her fountain pen for a lot more earth shattering than writing her reports, – and the date December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States enters World War II.